286 
Means the 
Creation 
of small 
Changes. 
If a child can be born with six fingers, or a “ calculating 
boy,” who sees by instinct results which would take a long 
time to calculate, or men of prodigious strength or genius, 
from parents who had no such powers, it is plain that entirely 
new organs and powers can be produced at once, that is, 
“created,” without passing through infinitely small stages 
of development. Therefore there is some power at work 
which has made laws of nature beyond our knowledge, capable 
of producing new creatures, whether fruits, organs, animals, 
or functions and instincts, complete in themselves, and superior 
to their parents. If that is not design, what would be ? 
Nor can the evolutionists account for the still earlier process 
of any kind of generation without some creative power to 
produce it. That also they quietly slide over as if its com- 
monness was sufficient to have begun it. And so they do with 
all the phenomena of “ cross-fertilisation,” as if it were a 
self-evident truth or axiom (like “ two straight lines cannot 
enclose a space ”), that touching what is called a female seed 
of one thing with the male seed of another, not too different, 
must produce offspring more or less like them both. (I .use 
the word “ seed ” here in its most primitive sense, not that 
of finished seeds or eggs.) If we are to assume such “ mys- 
teries ” as these to be necessary truths or automatic processes 
requiring no designing power to produce them, we might just 
as well assume the automatic existence of everything at 
first, with automatic powers of creating their successors ; for 
generation is creation, whether of like or unlike successors. 
The old notion of a vast multitude of special creations ot 
complete specimens and parents of new species, from time to 
time, obviously implies a much lower order of creative design 
than that which ordained, once for all, the machinery which 
we call laws of nature, capable of going on from the beginning 
to the end of time, working out “ beautiful and wonderful 
forms,” with some apparently self-acting apparatus for always 
adapting (which is changing) them, according to all the changing 
circumstances that arise. This too the evolutionists of all 
kinds quietly slip over, as if adaptation needed no cause and 
no explanation because it is done gradually and almost imper- 
ceptibly. So quietly does the great machine work, that it 
appears to go of itself, even while it is turning out prodigious 
changes. And because it works so smoothly, and never 
requires meddling with to make it do something new, we are 
asked to believe that it goes of itself, and made itself, and 
with no design of producing any particular results. Some go 
so far as to say that it could not help making itself; for that 
